The present invention relates to signal acquisition, and more particularly to pattern sequence and state transition triggers to enable acquisition triggering when a set of channels change from one state of interest to another.
For some time signal acquisition devices, such as oscilloscopes that acquire and display electrical signals, have allowed users to abstract Boolean logic from signals applied to input channels of the devices. For example a Boolean value may be assigned to the electrical signals of a two-channel oscilloscope that varies between 00 and 11 in binary—a four-channel oscilloscope varies between Boolean values of 0000 and 1111. In the four-channel illustration this implies that at any given instant in time the four channels may have one of sixteen different Boolean values. The transition to the next Boolean value is one of 256 possibilities. Currently acquisition devices do not have a means for triggering on specific state transitions, i.e., they are not programmable to trigger if, and only if, the prior state is “11” and the new state is “01.”
What is desired is the ability to identify and trigger on a transition from one specific Boolean state to another specific Boolean state.